The problem was that the EXIF headers in these files were mostly empty. EXIF headers contain information about the picture that the camera has filled in for you. The most useful of these fields is the date that the picture was taken. You can use jhead to remove those headers entirely. After I did that, iPhoto imported those pictures perfectly. So to remove the EXIF headers from your JPEGs:
- Download and unstuff jhead [17K]
- Make it executable by doing chmod 755 jhead
- Run jhead with '-de' option like this:
./jhead -de /path-to/pictures/*
[Editor's off-topic aside: I would like to point out that this is the 3,000th hint to appear on macosxhints.com since our launch in November of 2000 ... no wonder my fingers hurt!]

